The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (56 page)

The attempt by the general to recruit him to play baseball had only made Williams more suspicious of the Marines’ motives in recalling him, so he continued his efforts to explore ways to get released. “His lawyer was calling him about every other day,” remembered Bob Ferris, another major at Cherry Point who became a friend of Ted’s.
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Ferris said he never asked about the lawyer’s strategy, but he assumed the man was trying to build a case for loss of income, because a professional athlete had only a relatively short time to make his money—a variation of the hardship defense. “Ted did mention it several times. He’d look at his watch and say, ‘There’s another hour. I just lost five hundred bucks.’ He wasn’t too happy about his career being interrupted again in his prime, but he did not act real bitter. He was pretty well resigned to it. He liked flying and fishing.” Indeed, if Williams had any free time, he would go to Slocum Creek, off the Neuse River. Or to Camp Bryan, a privately owned hunting and fishing preserve.

The wealthy businessmen around Cherry Point were always entertaining and assisting him. Among them was a car dealer who had arranged a house off base where Doris and Bobby-Jo could stay with Ted. Irv Beck ran a local drive-in theater then, and would see the
Williams clan when Doris and Bobby-Jo were in town. “We showed popular movies, mostly westerns and musicals,” Beck said.
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“His wife and daughter used to come into the theater, sometimes with Ted, but mostly by themselves.”

Ferris, who would chat with Ted about life as the two men drove around in Williams’s new Cadillac, quickly became aware that Ted and Doris were having problems. Once, Ferris was visiting when Ted and Doris got into a big row over who was going to take Bobby-Jo out to dinner. “Doris said, ‘Ted, you’re taking her to dinner.’ He let loose at her with every four-letter word you could think of, and I just slunk down. I told him he should watch his language in public, but he didn’t care who heard him swear.”

It was obvious that Williams wasn’t thinking about Doris much. One time, as Ferris and Ted were checking out new fishing gear at the base PX, Ferris was startled to watch Williams respond aggressively to a flirtatious salesgirl. “Every gal was making eyes at Ted. This one girl behind the counter, who had a reputation of trying to make half the pilots on the base, said something to him, and he said to her, ‘How would you like me to grab you right by the snatch?’ ”

Ferris learned about Evelyn Turner when Ted let his involvement with her interfere with his duties. Ferris and Williams were down in Puerto Rico at the Roosevelt Roads Naval Station, practicing bombing and strafing maneuvers. Ted claimed his plane had mechanical problems and took it to a Marine base in Miami for servicing.

“Ted was dragging his feet in Miami,” Ferris said. “So Barr sent me up there to get him. I flew up to Miami. I told the bartender at the base I needed to find Captain Williams. Ted had left a phone number. I called the number, and a girl answered. She was a stewardess. Ted came on the phone, and I said, ‘Ted, there’s a plane early in the morning, [and] you got to be on it.’ At six thirty the next morning the blonde dropped Ted off at the base. He wasn’t too happy.”

Turner, who wrote about this episode with some delight in her account of her time with Williams, had been receiving regular letters from her lover since his arrival at Willow Grove and, subsequently, at Cherry Point. Mostly, Ted’s correspondences were filled with newsy, perfunctory updates scrawled out amid a hectic schedule. But there were occasionally tender, and ribald, terms of endearment as well, which suggested that Williams regarded his stewardess flame as something more than merely a zealous groupie:

Turner excitedly devoted more than three pages of her manuscript to her extended rendezvous with Ted when he was supposed to be in Roosevelt Roads, a time she said was extended to nearly two weeks because of bad weather and a sympathetic conspirator. Williams “wanted so much to have a bit of time away from the rigors of training,” Turner wrote. “The radio man who was to check over Ted’s jet was nearby, so after Ted buzzed a few whispers in his ear, the radio man motioned that he understood and had the situation well in hand. Of course, it was a surprise to some the next day when Ted’s plane developed ‘radio trouble.’ ” But by the end of two weeks the Marine Corps had grown “a bit curious as to where their prize pigeon had dropped by the wayside,” as Turner put it, and dispatched Bob Ferris to pick him up and ferry him back to where he was supposed to be.

On November 14 it was announced that Williams had received his orders for the Pacific—the Corps’ euphemism for Korea. He would be detached from Cherry Point on December 8, granted a leave until the end of the year, and then report to the Marine Air Station in El Toro, California, near Los Angeles, on January 2 before being sent overseas.

Two days later, Ted received word at Cherry Point that his father, Sam Williams, had died in a convalescent home near Oakland at the age of sixty-six. Williams flew out for the funeral and burial at the Masonic Cemetery in San Francisco. On the flight home, Ted wrote Evelyn that burying his father had been “the most heartbreaking moment of my life and made me feel guilty that I hadn’t been more considerate and been out to see him more often.… I know now you never realize how much you loved them till after there [
sic
] gone.”
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Williams returned home to Miami to begin putting his affairs in order. He wrote a friend that he expected to be killed in combat, but that he was “going to give it a battle.”
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The day after Christmas, in a move that reflected his growing uncertainty about his baseball future, Ted announced that he had acquired a 25 percent interest in Southern
Tackle Distributors, a Miami-based fishing-tackle firm, which served the Southeast, the Caribbean, and South America. Ted said he needed to start thinking about life after the big leagues, “something I can get my teeth into after I’m no longer able to swing a bat.”
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On New Year’s Eve, Ted and Fred Corcoran set out for Los Angeles on a National Airlines flight that was scheduled to stop in New Orleans. Corcoran’s main job was still to serve as promotional director for the PGA, whose first golf tournament of the season was the LA Open. There, Corcoran hoped to show off his star baseball client to Bing Crosby and the like, if Ted’s schedule permitted.

Evelyn joined the two men for the first leg of the flight. “As I deplaned in New Orleans,” she wrote, “Ted and I had a few moments in which to chat and say farewell. Neither of us knew, or could even slightly predict the destiny that the future held in its invisible hands.… I prayed fervently for his safe return.” She said Ted bet her that he would fly his first combat mission by February 15, 1953.

El Toro amounted to a high-level review and final tune-up on the F9F Panther, coupled with an arduous side trip to the Sierra Nevada mountains for cold-weather survival training. In 1951, the Marines had established the high-altitude Cold Weather Battalion in Pickel Meadows on 46,000 acres of the Toiyabe National Forest, near Bridgeport, California, by the Nevada state line, one hundred miles south of Reno. The idea was to prepare Ted and the other pilots—who would arrive in the midst of the harsh Korean winter—in case they were shot down and had to fend for themselves behind enemy lines. Williams described the experience in his book as “living on canned stuff, spruce sprouts for beds, parachute for a tent and I almost froze my tail off.”
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As he was prone to do, Ted picked up a virus, and he carried it with him all the way to Tokyo, where he was to lay over for a few days before going on to Korea. Soon, however, Williams was feeling well enough to inquire about female companionship. He bumped into Dick Francisco, the Marine pilot he’d trained with at Pensacola during World War II. Francisco had been recalled for Korea, too. He’d flown eighty-four missions, and was now on his way home.

“I hadn’t seen him since we were cadets,” Francisco recalled. “The first thing he says to me is, ‘Francisco, what can you screw around here that’s safe?’ I said, ‘You son of a bitch, you probably haven’t showered from your last encounter.’ He was a great cocksman. He always had pretty girls with him. He had a good line of baloney, too. He had a philosophy that you seduce them with words first.”
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Rejuvenated, Williams flew on to his base in Korea, at Pohang, a port city on the Sea of Japan in the southeastern part of the country. The Japanese had used the base in World War II—now the Marines called it K3, one of fifty-five American air bases in use throughout South Korea. The landing strip was six thousand feet long and had a corrugated mat. Williams looked around and didn’t like what he saw: “Crummy quarters, a real dog box. Cold and damp and awful,” he wrote in his book.

There were two fighter squadrons based at K3: VMF-115 and VMF-311. Ted was in 311, which had been the first land-based Marine squadron in Korea to be used for close air support—to bolster the operations of Marine and Army forces on the ground. The squadron used WL as its code letters, which were prominently displayed on the jets’ tails. The letters were spoken phonetically as “William Love,” from which came the squadron nickname Willy Lovers and the adoption of the heart as part of 311’s insignia. Pilots wore baby-blue scarves with pink hearts and the squadron name printed on them.
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The base itself was on a bluff overlooking the sea. Ted was assigned to officers’ quarters. These Quonset huts, each of which had two or three rooms, were square and made of corrugated metal. Some had sandbags on the roofs to keep them from blowing away. Each hut was serviced by a rancid six-hole outhouse.

Williams was in hut 1-C with two roommates: Major Jim Mitchell of San Francisco and Captain Lee Scott of Ellensburg, Washington, both of whom seemed charmed by their new celebrity companion and delighted in needling him.
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Ted’s bed consisted of two two-by-six boards, set three feet apart, with box springs fashioned from the inner tubes of a jet’s tires. Over the bed was a pinup calendar from a Columbus, Ohio, auto parts firm. A predecessor had brought the calendar with him, and Ted opted not to disturb it.

K3 was 180 miles south of the bomb line—the front where ground troops had dug-in positions. Most flights were run in support of the First Marine Division. Generally, four or eight planes would go on a mission; sometimes it would be a squadron of twenty-four. Career officers and reservists were supposed to be paired together within the groups. Unlike the newer and faster F-86 Sabre jet used by the Air Force to engage the Soviet MiG-15, the Marines’ F9F Panther was heavier, less agile, and geared for ground support. It carried a three-thousand-pound bomb payload and five-inch-diameter high-velocity aircraft rockets, or HVARs. It was equipped with four twenty-millimeter cannons and could carry napalm.
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The Joint Operations Center in Seoul, which coordinated all air activities in Korea, would assign the missions, specifying enemy targets and the payload each jet would carry. The orders would come down in late afternoon for the following day. The operations officer for K3 would then do the scheduling. A flight would usually go out early in the morning, at first light, with each pilot carrying aerial reconnaissance maps and a photo of the target. Occasionally there might be another flight later in the day. Half the missions were generally close air support—low-altitude strafing of targets using bombs, HVARs, napalm, or a combination thereof. The other half would be interdiction missions carried out farther north, behind enemy lines (or in Indian Country, as the Marines called it), targeting manufacturing plants, ammunition dumps, or bridges.

Williams flew his first combat mission on the morning of February 16, 1953, the day after the deadline he’d set for Evelyn Turner—a thirty-five-plane strike involving both VMF-311 and VMF-115, targeting a tank-and-infantry training school along Highway 1, fifteen miles south of Pyongyang, the North Korean capital.

Ted was assigned to be the wingman for Marvin “Pinky” Hollenbeck, then a major who was to lead a four-plane division. Hollenbeck knew this was Ted’s first combat. They discussed the mission in the ready room before takeoff. “We were after a heavy target that day,” Hollenbeck remembered. The two squadrons would fly about two hundred yards apart in designated sectors. “We had to dive, and when we came off the target go directly west to a river, then due south, climbing toward Seoul and the base. I said, ‘Ted, this is your first mission. I don’t care if you hit the target or not. I just want you to be safe.’ ”
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After Hollenbeck dove steeply, Williams followed, but in the haze and smoke from the bombs he soon lost sight of Hollenbeck. Ted dove in low at about forty-five degrees, dropped his bombs, then climbed out and headed toward a prearranged rendezvous point. But as he approached five thousand feet, red emergency lights lit up on his instrument panel, and the throttle stick began shaking hard. Though he hadn’t heard it or felt it, he’d been hit by small arms fire. Instead, thinking that he had a hydraulic leak, he called for help, but his radio was out.

Williams was heading the wrong way, northwest, farther into North Korea, when he was spotted by Larry Hawkins, who was the leader of a two-plane section of Hollenbeck’s division. Hawkins had just turned twenty-two. He was from a small town in Pennsylvania and so gung-ho that his parents had had to sign a waiver so that he could enlist in the Marine Corps at age seventeen, after graduating from high school.

Ted’s “plane was sputtering, streaming fluid,” Hawkins recalled. “If it had been hydraulic it would have been finished, so I knew it was leaking fuel. By this time I had him turning west, heading to the Yellow Sea. I patted my head and took the lead. He indicated he had no radio. We were climbing at a high rate of speed. I think we were up to twenty thousand or twenty-five thousand feet. I wanted to get out of range of antiaircraft fire, which could reach nineteen thousand to twenty thousand feet.”
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